FILM REVIEW; A Cautionary Tale Arguing for Freedom of Expression

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: February 11, 2005

It was the image seen -- cheered and jeered, canonized and demonized -- around the world. In 1972 Linda Lovelace, nee Linda Boreman, star of the notorious hard-core movie ''Deep Throat,'' played the role that would bequeath on her a tawdry and lasting celebrity. With a single act of extreme fellatio, this dazed and often confused 23-year-old became a pinup for the party animal's sexual revolution and, in time, a martyr in the crusade against pornography. But as is clear from the lively, if maddeningly reductive documentary ''Inside Deep Throat,'' Ms. Boreman was also little more than a pawn, an empty vessel for opportunists from both sides of the pornography divide.

Written and directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, who produced the film with the Hollywood big shot Brian Grazer (''A Beautiful Mind''), ''Inside Deep Throat'' is a ''slam, bam, thank you, ma'am'' trifle of an entertainment. Strategically packaged for Generation A.D.D., with rapid-fire editing, flash graphics and a breathlessly upbeat vibe, the documentary fuses a m?nge of stag-loop snippets, educational-film guffaws and television news reports with a hit parade of talking heads. Among the notables delivering generally less-than-considered opinions are hipster antiques like Norman Mailer, Hugh Hefner, Xaviera Hollander and Dick Cavett, who claims never to have seen ''Deep Throat.'' The most entertaining? The Cosmo senior Helen Gurley Brown, who happily volunteers that ejaculate is good for the complexion.

These veterans of the sexual revolution certainly give good talk, but far more entertaining are the men and women who occupied the revolution's front lines, including the director of ''Deep Throat,'' Jerry Gerard, the nom de porn of the hairdresser turned hard-core auteur Gerard Damiano. The man who immortalized Linda Lovelace or at least her singular talent, Mr. Damiano shot ''Deep Throat'' for around $25,000 (the final cost was $40,000), money furnished by Anthony Peraino Sr. and his son Louis, associates of the Colombo crime family. As The Los Angeles Times reported in a 1982 article, information the documentary conspicuously glosses over, the elder Peraino entered the pornography industry in the late 1960's, becoming a leader in ''organized crime's most profitable new business venture.'' No kidding: ''Deep Throat'' raked in millions.

But that's getting ahead of the story, or at least the high-minded narrative of release and repression that the filmmakers go to such pains to construct. Superficially framed as a lighthearted, fun-loving pr?s of this pornographic phenomenon and its fallout, ''Inside Deep Throat'' is at its core an argument for freedom of expression and a somewhat cautionary tale. For Mr. Bailey and Mr. Barbato, and one imagines for Mr. Grazer as well, it appears that ''Deep Throat,'' and its 62 minutes of parlor tricks, bodily fluids, cartoon performances and ear-achingly bad music, is more than a skirmish in the culture wars that, as the documentary's narrator, Dennis Hopper, gravely intones, ''divides us as never before.'' For them, it represents a historic battle of epic proportions.

That seems an awfully heavy burden for this cheap little movie to carry, not that it didn't make a splash. On its release in June 1972, ''Deep Throat'' produced an instant uproar and an apparently insatiable audience more diversified than pornography's previous dirty-old demographic. In a 1973 article in The New York Times Magazine headlined ''Porno Chic,'' the reporter Ralph Blumenthal described how the patronage of Truman Capote and others helped turn this grind-house quickie into a fad and detailed how the courts were helping turn it into a First Amendment cause. The same summer that ''Deep Throat'' opened, the movie was found obscene and seized, only to be returned to theaters the next day. The money continued to flow, as did the legal and cultural debates.

During one of the obscenity trials involving the movie, Arthur Knight, a film critic for Saturday Review, testified that ''Deep Throat'' had redeeming social value because, as Mr. Blumenthal wrote in The Times, ''it helped people to expand their sexual horizons and particularly emphasized that a woman's sexual gratification was as important as a man's.'' Notwithstanding, as this detail-oriented reporter noted, of the film's 15 sex acts, exactly 7 involve fellatio and 4 involve cunnilingus. As was the case with many early pornographers, female pleasure was not especially on Mr. Damiano's mind when he trained his camera on Ms. Boreman and her jocular co-star, Harry Reems. As it turns out her welfare wasn't a factor either, as Mr. Damiano acknowledges in a new book on the history of the pornographic film industry, ''The Other Hollywood,'' by Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne.

The more depressingly sordid details of Linda Boreman's transformation into Linda Lovelace do not register as meaningfully in the documentary as all those high times and all that big money. The filmmakers draw attention to a large bruise splayed across one of her thighs in ''Deep Throat,'' which was probably inflicted by her husband, a gutter Svengali named Chuck Traynor. But there is little in the documentary to make you wince, as is not the case with ''The Other Hollywood,'' which recounts regular beatings of Ms. Boreman by her husband and includes a repulsively ugly account of their life together in pornography. (Both have since died.) The problem, of course, is, that like pornography's early ties to the mob, which the filmmakers use for some comic relief, Ms. Boreman's life was a serious downer.

Poor Linda -- what a buzz kill. The same goes for those pesky feminists who eventually declared war on pleasure and helped bring the great porn utopia to an end. Or so Mr. Bailey and Mr. Barbato suggest with some historical reductionism that insults feminists who enjoy pornography, as well as those who work in its industry. Given the current political and cultural climate -- just days ago a House panel voted to increase broadcast indecency penalties -- there is something to be said for anything that celebrates our right to enjoy really lousy pornography. Too bad that in the process of building their case, the makers of ''Inside Deep Throat'' didn't work harder to understand why hard-core pornography sent some women into the streets and others behind cameras, or why Anthony Comstock is as much with us today as he was in the late-19th century.

''Inside Deep Throat'' is rated NC-17 (No one 17 or under admitted). It has hard-core, sexually explicit material, including images of Linda Lovelace in ''Deep Throat'' performing, as she later put it, ''like a sword swallower.''

'Inside Deep Throat'
Opens today nationwide.

Written and directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato; directors of photography, David Kempner and Teodoro Maniaci; edited by William Grayburn and Jeremy Simmons; music by David Steinberg; produced by Mr. Bailey, Mr. Barbato and Brian Grazer; released by Imagine Entertainment in association with HBO Documentary Films. Running time: 90 minutes. This film is rated NC-17.